San Francisco Impressions

Is a city like a natural landscape?

I visited San Francisco for the second time this last week. I liked it a lot, and I have a long piece with some photos coming out next week. It has a lot of character, a lot of history you can see and experience, a lot of architectural beauty. But here I want to think through something more abstract.

Really, this was my first time in the city, because I was a kid when we took a family vacation there years ago. I don’t remember having much of an impression of the city, really. I do remember the lady at a flower show saying that somewhere in the world there were giant meat-eating flowers big enough to devour a monkey, and getting yelled at by a Chinese grocery store owner for taking a picture of the wriggling live frogs for sale. It must have been safer back then, too, because I don’t remember my parents scolding me about looking or pointing at anything.

After San Francisco, on that family trip, we drove north, and saw the redwoods (and a banana slug!), a few beaches, and wine country. That was probably the tail end of free, walk-in wine tastings in Napa Valley wineries. That beautiful landscape, urban and coastal and deeply cultivated country, was kind of just there for all comers. Well, not all, but it was quite accessible. It wasn’t an exclusive, self-conscious thing to visit at that time.

It’s striking how quickly that family trip became a luxury. But it isn’t exactly surprising to me. More and more people want to see it all, and escalating prices are about crowd control along with (obviously) squeezing higher profits.

One factor in the transformation of Napa Valley was that young people figured out they could “go out drinking” for free by hitting a bunch of wineries in a single day, rushing through the tastings, and not buying any bottles. Expensive tastings cut down on this abuse, and also on drunk driving, which obviously would be an issue with people using the free tastings to get drunk. Foreign tourism, and the increasing cachet of Napa, were part of it too.

You can kind of see these things as things that will happen, or you can try to identify blame: “If not for those drunken 20-somethings and rich foreigners, we could still have free wine tastings!” But that doesn’t capture the reality. Lots of things that are luxuries now weren’t at one time; some things that are common and cheap now were luxuries once. All sorts of things change all the time, and it’s a kind of false reality to imagine that nothing would ever change except for the machinations of malign actors.

There was this essay making the rounds a few weeks ago from the right-wing anonymous essayist who goes by Peachy Keenan, about how Disney’s corporate greed has put that old American middle-class vacation out of reach. I don’t think corporate greed doesn’t exist, but you see the same thing with those Napa Valley wineries, which of course want to make money but aren’t quite the slick corporate machine that Disney is (some are behemoths, but many are still family-owned and relatively small).

You see this with the handful of extremely popular national parks, too, especially Yellowstone. And national parks are not in the business of maximizing profits. In fact, some analysts think the solution to crushing crowds is to make the parks more expensive. (Maybe there are other ways—online reservations only, or a lottery system.)

But at the end of the day, Disneyland and Napa and Yellowstone aren’t getting bigger as the population gets bigger. There really is less of certain things to go around. This is all kind of adjacent to cities and housing and the YIMBY movement, because cities have seen this same process play out, of becoming increasingly out of reach to people of average means. But these also aren’t analogous, because you can build more of a city in a way that you can’t build more of a national park or perfect wine-growing terroir. (An iconic theme park kind of feels like it’s in between.)

But can you? That’s kind of one of the conceptual tensions here: between a place as it exists now, and the inevitable loss of some of what already exists involved in new growth. I think we tend to see our old cities as akin to something like Yellowstone: places that are fixed, that can only be preserved or destroyed, not created.